Deborah Muirhead "Innards" 2006

Marco Phillips "CATAPULT"

Susan Schwalb "Moment"

Suzanne Volmer "Aquatic Maquette"

List of Participants

Deborah Muirhead
Susan Schwalb
Suzanne Volmer

Fresh Produce presents:
Marco Phillips

Abstraction Updated
Curated by
Alicia Faxon

September 6,2007 -
October 12, 2007

September 6 Opening Reception:
6:00 pm :: Gallery Talk
5:00-8:00 pm :: Reception

Recently in museums and galleries there has been a great deal of interest in current abstract art. The subject of the April 2007 Art News was "The New Abstraction" and recent exhibitions such as "Big Bang! Abstract Painting for the 21st Century" at the DeCordova Museum have featured this theme. There is renewed energy in the many vocabularies of abstract art and the artists practicing them.

In this exhibition we have three artists whose paintings, drawings and sculpture explore different possibilities of abstract form. Susan Schwalb, equally well known for her paintings and metalpoint drawings, works with a minimalist grid producing many different approaches, some purely formal, others reflecting events or landscapes experienced within the limitations of her media. She creates an incredible number of variations on a theme from stark black and white images to brilliantly colored paintings. The works in this exhibition are from the red/white/blue series commenting on the devastation of the 9/11 collapse of the World Trade buildings. Completely disciplined and formal in their means, the works are also expressive of the emotions of the event, with red blood-like bands of color and the revelation of the red underpainting beneath the surface. They are both a cry and a formal acknowledgement.

Deborah Muirhead is a painter and a producer of artist's books who is Professor of Art at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. In contrast to the stark means of Schwalb's works, her paintings are more lyric and organic. Without delineating a specific image she suggests endless possibilities. Skeins of thread, hair or curving branches cross various spaces to create a map of both ambiguity and connection. They also refer to strands of hair and DNA patterns, hinting at issues of identity and ethnicity. Muirhead draws the viewer into her space to be co-creator of meaning. Her canvases both reveal and conceal, allowing imagination and scope into her allusive terrain.

Suzanne Volmer, a Rhode Island artist, is a sculpture of welded metal, porcelain and mixed media. Having had a career in New York, including a stint at the Leo Castelli gallery, she now creates both exterior and interior works in new and original configurations. Her technique in making both sculptural pieces and abstract vessels leaves an element to chance in the firing of the pieces, so that both accident and control are featured. She also uses both metal and fired porcelain together in many of her pieces, creating a variety of surfaces and texture contrasts. Her sculptures sometimes suggest organic unfolding, at other times evoke hybrid mechanical constructions. Here too the imagination of the viewer comes into play, making them participants in the experience and not just viewers.

Abstract art has sometimes been seen as cold and distant. In Abstraction Updated the viewer is a vital part of the process in a continuing dialogue with the artists.

Alicia Faxon, 2007